


In Hopes You're on the Other Side, Talking To Me Too

by HankTalking



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing Clothes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:33:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28972137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HankTalking/pseuds/HankTalking
Summary: or am I a fool, who sits alone, talking to the moon?(tavish keeps the shirt)
Relationships: Demoman/Soldier (Team Fortress 2)
Kudos: 54
Collections: Boots 'n Bombs Fanfiction





	1. someone's talking back

**Author's Note:**

> Inspo is [this adventure time comic](https://twitter.com/Goat_Ally/status/1330674290463797248) and also thanks to saintsugoi for helping w ideas!

“I got you it.”

“What?” is all Tavish can ask before the bundle of clothes is shoved into his hands. “Jane what is this? Why are you handing out jumpers?”

“You said you wanted it and I got it,” Jane explains simply, as though he did this all the time, as though he’d ever spent money on a material possession that couldn’t be eaten or loaded into the barrel of a shotgun. “At the last game. You said you wished you’d gotten the shirt instead of the foam finger.”

Tavish uncurls the sweater slowly in his lap. It’s soft, oddly thick; far better quality than Tavish would ever expect of something that came from the Badwater Brawlers brand. Like their chances of ever winning a game, the team tends to spoil anything it touches.

So then. The sweater. Warm looking, terrible for any sort of weather here in New Mexico except for maybe in the late winter months when the nights draw ice on the windows. The color is an off-white, or a cream maybe, little pale fibers catching wicks of the setting sun. He rubs it between his fingers.

“That was weeks ago, when we went to that game,” Tavish says, snagging a look at Jane as the Soldier drops his legs over the dock’s edge. “I can’t believe you remembered all this time.”

“Of course I remember,” Jane barks indignant. “I remember everything! Like a hippopotamus!”

“That’s elephants lad.”

“Ridiculous! As if I could be something as un-American as an elephant. Hippopotamuses are the _true_ great mammals of the American wilderness, fearless, tireless, roaming our national bodies of water with the spirit of _ten_ elephants. They could tear us to shreds without a second thought! They could emerge from that lake right now and devour us whole!”

Jane casts an accusing finger over the salt lake, but no hippopotami rise to the challenge. The light flings colors over the water, past the waves and all the way to the dock where the two men have already turned in their boat for the evening. By this point one of them should’ve probably just bought a skipper by now, but something about having to manage a _boat_ in the middle of the _desert_ rankles Tavish’s nerves, so he’s never indulged that thought. He returns to the sweater, heavy in his hands, weighing on him as it covers his knees.

He knows he should drop it. That the oddness rising in his stomach is his own fantasy, nothing more, but he can’t just leave it at that. He has to know. “Why though?”

“You are very hard to buy gifts for,” Jane says, matter of fact. “Everything you want, you already own.”

“Why do you need to buy gifts for me in the first place?” Tavish asks, nerves sparking.

“Because you should have something nice. From me. That is important Tavish.”

Tavish’s jaw works for a few seconds, then closes. He doesn’t always get the Soldier at the best of times, and now he’s worried that if he says more than he’s thinking he’ll take them both barreling to places he doesn’t want to go, questions he won’t put the right inflection to, reveal how lost he is. So he stays quiet, and instead offers, “thank you Jane.”

* * *

The shirt sits laid out over his wardrobe for weeks. It’s a nice gift and he should wear it, but there’s really no opportunity to unless he wants to risk heatstroke. So instead it sits, and he sits, and he contemplates.

If it were anyone else, Tavish would dismiss it out of hand. Friends give each other gifts, after all, and though Tavish has never himself had a friend like that (one that was for more than getting pished with, for more than stilted conversations that go nowhere) he knows that it’s nothing out of the ordinary. But from Jane? The man’s ideas of affection range from the blindingly sincere to ‘no girl talk’ by the minute, openly honest yet amazingly rigid in how he claims a friendship should go. It could be simple for anyone else. Simple for anyone who isn’t led astray by their own hopes.

Jane gave him a gift and wanted it to be important. Tavish can read that how he wants, and what he _wants_ is that Jane is just as scared of the thing that might be between them as he is.

 _I’ll do it_ , Tavish thinks one day. He won’t ask what Jane feels because he knows that if the same was done to him he’d straight up lie under sheer denial. But if Tavish confesses first, then Jane might…He might…Well there’s hope. Some of it now. And the thing about hope is that it tends to blind, shield you from the worst case scenario that Tavish can’t even think of because the idea that Jane loves him back is too comforting a bait to ignore. _Tomorrow_ , he promises himself. Tomorrow he’ll go to Jane’s apartment and tell him everything, and today he can rest in the relief of finally having made a decision.

It’s his morning off, after all.


	2. you're all i had

It’s inaccurate to say Tavish curses his name.

The hateful spittle that comes flying from his mouth has neither the power nor the eloquence of a curse, yet all of the venom, stinging his tongue his throat his lips where they chap. It slurs out as he guts the Soldier yet again, drunk and lopsided just like his footing, staggering as he stands over the corpse. It’s not a curse, it’s the whole bloody hex.

He was such a damn fool—he knows that much as he gets home and drinks himself into a stupor. It’s easier to blame Jane, for being such a damn coward, a traitor, but in the end he knows it’s his own fault. For believing there was something there when there wasn’t. For hoping. Jane was never his, but he mourns the loss as bitterly as he would a lover of a dozen years.

His face is a mess. He wipes and wipes but the tears won’t come out, not helped by the alcohol which also puts a leak to his nose. It’s that then, one final humiliation, that despite knowing he was a fool to begin with he misses the Soldier more than anything in the world. He still loves him. Loves him even as he’s been hired to kill him daily. Loves him even as Jane does the same.

The sweater is clutched in his hands as he sits on his bed and tries to clear his face with his sleeve. _Better_ is a relative term, but he does feel something…stiller…as he holds it, staring down at the words as though reading over and over again will provide some yet-unknown meaning besides being the name of a stupid basketball team. His fingers squeeze the fabric, and he imagines he’s holding Jane’s arm once again, steadying it as he helps him pull in a catch.

He takes to wearing it to sleep. A paltry comfort, and he knows, oh he _knows_ how pathetic he is, sniffling by himself in the dark, arms wrapped around a failure’s body. But it’s warm as the night sets in and it reminds him of Jane. The Jane he thought he had, not the one that exists.

That one little thing, _that_ could be forgiven. It’s shameful and embarrassing, but we all have those, the idiosyncrasies we do to get through the night, the ones we don’t even acknowledge to ourselves in the morning. The blessed secrets kept only by moon and stars. But. Tavish forgets one day. Showering his become more of an event than a routine these days, and he _knows_ he’s letting himself get worse, knows that he isn’t eating as much as he should, knows he’s going through more bottles per day than he’s ever done in his life—but at least he can _sleep_. Sleeping shuts out the world and his fool’s mistakes, and as he sits in his car realizing he hasn’t changed out of the sweater, he can’t find it in him to care. He drives to work, unshaved, the cashmere heavy against him.

It’s unbearable on under his bombsuit, the weight of two turtlenecks. He might just get heatstroke. He might just deserve it.

* * *

The Soldier crashes into him shoulder first.

He’s not sure when he stopped thinking of him as Jane, thinks it might have been some time between the third day of the war and when Jane decided he was tired of the Equalizer and went back to beating Tavish’s brain in with a shovel. Bit hazy that one. It doesn’t really matter all that much how Tavish thinks of him, whether he’s Jane one moment of Soldier the next, what matters is that the BLU has made a tactical error. It might have been a good attack, but he had failed to factor in the fact that Tavish sill has a six-inch spike attached to his arm.

“Hrgagmaggot, ygadamn traitorous scgummraaa!” he roars, still trying to strike Tavish with his mêlée weapon around his shield, all in spite of the now gaping hole in his abdomen and that Tavish broke his jaw less than a minute ago.

“Shut up!” Tavish screams right back. “For once in your bloody life _just shut up!_ ”

He’s so damn tired of this, of driving in only to be torn apart by the man he used to know. To have these obscenities foisted upon him when all he’s ever done is defend himself. To be verbally eviscerated for…for what he doesn’t know. All he knows is that Jane hates him, maybe always did, deep down. He doubts he’ll win this war. All he wants is satisfaction.

“Judgus!” Soldier ignores him, hollering barley discernable words out his shattered mouth. “Ig will not lget your _lies_ -”

Tavish takes them both to the ground, beating Jane’s face, just trying to make him stop talking. They’re lying too close to the battlefield though, too close that their little scuffle can go unnoticed in this game of _team effort_. An explosive—of indeterminate type when on the receiving end, but Tavish would bet anything it’s his own Soldier—comes careening in their direction. Neither of them are able enough to move out of its oncoming trajectory, and all they can do is kick off each other in a feeble attempt to get free of their self-inflicted tangle.

The detonation blasts them apart, flying from one another and sending Tavish into a wooden wall. He’s used to suffering his own explosive damage, but the bombsuit can only take so much, and it gives its life to protect his—when he stands, its sloughs off in places, straps loose and smoking as fire catches underneath. Despite all that, Soldier has still gotten the worst of it. As Tavish staggers to the railing for support, he catches sight of Jane as skin and hair burn, only able twitch helplessly as the flames begins to devour his body. His helmet is gone, eyes rolled backwards in his head, gaping wide and blue at the Demoman behind him.

Tavish lurches toward him, lifting his blade. “This’ll shut you up,” Tavish carries on, poising the Eyelander two-handed over Soldier’s throat. “Make you finally…you goddamned-”

“You kept the shirt,” Jane whispers.

Tavish freezes, cruelly, dangerously, in the midst of putting the Soldier out of his misery. The air in his lungs does the same.

Part of his uniform has burned away, crackles at the edges like a fraying wound, revealing the sweater underneath that has yet to be singed. The off-white has been mutated by constant use, hoarding stains and tears and heartbreak until it’s faded from glory, no longer new, no longer bright like the day Jane gave it to him.

Tavish has no words, at first. Jane just stares up up up at him, wide, wheezing, the traces of rage smacked clean off his face.

“Of course I kept it.” The words burble out, like the tears at his eye he’d been shedding before the rocket had even come. “It was important. It was supposed to be important.” The admission comes out not by his own will. It’s the shock that must be doing it then. The shock, and the emptiness inside.

Jane says no more, just looks at him, barely breathing as he shudders in the charred husk of his own body.

Tavish can’t bring the blade down. He watches the last movements dissipate from the Soldier, eyes growing glassy, and grabs at his own chest with one hand. Then he sinks. One knee, cracking on the concrete, sword tip burying itself in stone as he clutches at the fabric of the sweater and weeping openly.

“Of course I did,” he repeats. “I loved you and I wanted…I wanted everything. Everything you ever gave me. You _bastard_ I…all I wanted was…”

He cries over the corpse, not touching it, not touching him. The guilt overwhelms, his stilted, croaking confession to the man he’ll kill again tomorrow.

But the Soldier isn’t dead.

Tavish freezes at the movement, the hand reaching up to touch his cheek. It’s barely there at all, as though the skin it’s feeling for might burn too. “You…” Jane asks, hoarse, fading. Not yet gone but close, his eyes barely seeing. “You…loved me?”

Just like the dock, just like the sunset, Tavish’s mouth works but doesn’t speak. The terror of this moment, that Jane heard all that when he thought he could share one last confession to an empty husk that just so happened to look like a Soldier, sets upon him. He’s weakened himself, subsumed to mortification.

There’s a great shuddering in Jane’s chest, and it takes a moment to resolve itself into a laugh. “All this time I thought…after what you said I thought…god I love you Tavish.”

The air Tavish sucks in tastes like charred flesh. “…Jane?”

Jane might have cried if his tear ducts weren’t fried to his face. He says nothing, movements just growing fainter, and when his hand slips from Tavish’s face, the Demoman tries to catch it. It does no good. Jane is truly dead this time, and Tavish presses their foreheads together and cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one also had [art inspo](https://twitter.com/Goat_Ally/status/1352050347741753344) thank u Goat Ally 4 my life


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